Extract from ABC News
Analysis
Donald Trump's threats have surprised his allies. (Reuters: Kevin Lamarque)
In the year since Donald Trump was inaugurated, world leaders have streamed into the White House to kiss the ring.
Some, including Australia's Anthony Albanese, emerge from their meetings still smiling. Some do not.
A stony-faced delegation from Denmark and Greenland went viral last week after their chat with the US president's team seemed to go so badly it sparked an impromptu debrief — complete with cigarettes — in a nearby car park.
But 12 months into Trump's second term, something has become clear: even those who leave the Oval Office with a deal, beware. It might not be worth the paper it's written on.
And yes, that goes for Australia, too.
Donald Trump greets Anthony Albanese outside the White House last year. (Reuters: Kevin Lamarque)
This hypothesis stacked up at the weekend, when Trump blindsided eight allies by announcing new tariffs on them.
On Saturday, the president said France, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland and the United Kingdom would all face an additional 10 per cent levy on exports to the US from February 1 unless they supported his plan to buy Greenland.
If a deal isn't done by June, the tariffs would rise to 25 per cent, he said in a social media post.
The president's threats come despite the European Union (EU), which represents all the affected countries except the UK, having negotiated a trade agreement with the US in July last year.
"It's a good deal for everybody," Trump said at the time. "It's going to bring us closer together."
That sentiment lasted less than six months
The UK, which had still been thrashing out a new deal with the US, is scrambling to assess its new reality.
Britain, like Australia, had been under the impression its relationship with the Trump White House was rock solid.
The president, whose late mother was Scottish, last year even said the UK would be protected from future tariffs "because I like them".
Downing Street had pulled out all the stops to ingratiate itself to Trump. On his first visit to the Oval Office, British PM Sir Keir Starmer brought a letter from King Charles III inviting Trump for an unprecedented second state visit.
Could efforts like this have counted for nothing?
California's Governor Gavin Newsom, who's considered a potential future US presidential candidate, thinks so, saying world leaders are being "played".
"It's embarrassing," he told reporters after arriving in Davos, Switzerland on Tuesday for the World Economic Forum.
Trump is expected to address that gathering on Wednesday.
Trump and the madman theory
Albanese visited the White House in October and his meeting was widely lauded back home as a major success.
While Australia has been slapped with a 10 per cent tariff on its exports to the US, the PM has even been able to frame that as a victory, given it's the president's stated minimum level for all nations.
But we're learning no-one is immune when Trump changes his mind, and some argue there is no issue too trivial for the 79-year-old to pick a fight over.
"The reality that the US president has the reasoning power of a kindergarten child is probably more compelling than that he's slipping into cognitive decline," wrote former Australian foreign minister Bob Carr in a social media post this week.
Could Trump take issue with the Albanese government's freshly passed tighter gun laws and hate speech reforms, given his scepticism of those matters in the US?
Could the president target Australia if it rejects its invitation to pay $US1 billion ($1.49 billion) and join his so-called global Board of Peace? When France declined, Trump threatened to introduce 200 per cent tariffs on its wine and champagne exports.
Trump has previously expressed support for a British government plan to return the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, but on Tuesday, he called it an "act of great stupidity". Could the president next decide he no longer likes the AUKUS defence pact, too?
James D Boys, a senior visiting research fellow at University College London's Centre on US Politics, says no country is immune from the US president's threats.
"If I'm the leadership in Australia right now, I'd be keeping my head down and trying to stay out of the way," he says.
"I'd be trying to stay well away from everything that's going on with Greenland and the NATO alliance."
Boys, in his soon-to-be-released book, argues Trump negotiates using the madman theory.
It's a political strategy in which a leader purposely appears unhinged, and even makes extreme threats, in a bid to exact concessions from others.
"Controversial though that might be, it would seem to have worked," Boys says.
"If you're Donald Trump, you'd look at past actions like threatening Venezuela. Venezuela didn't play ball. their leader is now languishing in an American prison.
"There is a series of examples like that. In the case of Greenland, the Trump administration realises that if it wants other countries to jump, it has to impact their pockets.
"It will be interesting to see the extent to which foreign leaders are prepared to play ball now, though.
"I think European leaders are possibly looking at these latest threats and thinking we can't keep falling for this trick."
They're meeting in Brussels on Thursday night to map out their next move.
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